Copy Wrong: Internet Piracy and Dickens and Melville

Baker, Kevin, American Heritage

"YES, I READ THE ILLEGAL TRANSLATION, a Czech Internet correspondent known as "Hustey" wrote last summer, when the next, eagerly awaited book in J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series--Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix--first appeared in bookstores. Hustey is part of a growing, worldwide fraternity of Internet users who seem to have come to the conclusion that theft is morally defensible, so long as it only involves intellectual property.

One J.C., a 36-year-old man from Kansas City, not only admitted his theft but threw in a review: "I thought it was a little slow until the second half, then it got much better"--a bit of chutzpah akin to having someone steal your car and then post a public notice complaining about its pickup.

Electronic theft has largely revolved around the downloading of popular music. Recently, though, it has expanded to books. "This shows that if authors and publishers choose not to make books available legally, people are going to go out and steal them," claims Mike Seagroves, director of business development of Palm Digital Media, the largest commercial distributor of e-books. Palm Digital Media apparently believes that Rowling is asking for too much money to have her e-book distributed legally. And everyone knows that the proper reaction to something's being overpriced is to go steal it.

Some will no doubt point out that Rowling has already made a fortune from previous book sales. True enough. But Rowling was a broke, struggling single mother when she invented Harry Potter, thereby creating a commodity that has given joy to millions of children and adults. She has even made it available to many readers for free--at those marvelous institutions known as public libraries. By what right, then, should she be deprived of any of the money legally due her?

This is not the first time that a determined English writer who worked their way up from nothing to become the most popular writer in the world has had to fight the publishing pirates. A century and a half ago Charles Dickens faced the same battle, though back then the main culprits were not e-wizards but Americans.

The love affair between Dickens and America started early. Citizens of New York and Boston swarmed the docksides to get the latest installments of The Old Curiosity Shop, and Dickens, in turn, would claim, once he got to the United States for the first time, in 1842, that he had "dreamed by day and night, for years, of setting foot upon this shore."

At first, everything on his initial American tour went splendidly. At a spectacular banquet in Boston he made a graceful speech in which he praised leading American writers as being "as familiar to our [British] lips as household words." He went on to express the "hope the time is not far distant when they, in America, will receive of right some substantial profit and return in England from their labours; and when we, in England, shall receive some substantial profit and return in America from ours," though he assured his audience, "Pray do not misunderstand me.... I would rather have the affectionate regard of my fellow men than I would have heaps and mines of gold."

The speech was received with what those in attendance described as wild, "tumultuous" applause. Yet the next day's newspapers were full of articles accusing him of bad taste, and he was charged with having "awakened huge dissonance where all else was triumphant unison." Dickens, it seemed, had touched on an issue close to the papers' mercenary hearts.

In 1842 there was still no international copyright law, a condition that was stunting American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writers--but only if their countries reciprocated.

This American publishers adamantly refused to do. Instead, they competed in bribing English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. …

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